Bloody fairytales

Naked men, crazed brides and sinister surgeons are all in a night's work for Jan Fabre, writes Susan Shineberg.

By his own admission Jan Fabre is fascinated by blood; some might even say obsessed. Ever since the controversial Flemish artist, writer and director first discovered the paintings of fellow countrymen Brueghel and Hieronymous Bosch at the age of 18, blood has been a central theme in his creative output.

As the title of his "medieval fairytale" for the Melbourne Festival suggests, I Am Blood takes this notion as its starting point and constructs a vast, shifting fresco of blood-drenched images from the Middle Ages, gamely presented by the mostly young, lithe members of Fabre's Troubleyn Theatre. A desperate, blood-spattered knight battles a ghostly enemy; a horde of crazed brides savage a naked man writhing at their feet. Figures engaged in scenes of debauchery, torture and sadomasochistic rituals might have stepped straight out of one of Bosch's nightmare landscapes. What does it all mean?

As far as Fabre is concerned, these raunchy images are simply part of an ongoing tradition of classical art, certainly where he comes from.

"It's in our Flemish roots," he says. "The idea of indulgence, eroticism and feasting on the one hand, then going to church the next day and asking for forgiveness." Fabre smiles and adds: "This part of Belgium is very Catholic, quite different from the Protestant, Calvinistic thinking further north. And in those paintings of the Flemish masters you always see figures dancing and drinking and giving themselves over to life completely as a kind of ecstatic ritual. Lots of rock'n'roll, in a sense."

An appropriate image, since Fabre has acquired something of the status and allure of a pop star in his home town of Antwerp, where I Am Blood has just finished a sell-out season at the deSingel Theatre. He is the artist in residence there. The production, five years in the gestation, was first performed outdoors at the Papal Palace in Avignon two years ago, complete with blood running down the walls.

"I'm very influenced by that particular period," says Fabre. "They call it the Dark Ages, but there were some amazing painters, writers, composers and mystics. It was a very mystic period, with important empirical scholars like Hildegard von Bingen, whose texts I also use."

Fabre is foremost a visual artist and I Am Blood is best understood as a living collage rather than as dramatic theatre. Metaphors of sacred and taboo perceptions about blood are played out, from the sufferings of Christian martyrs to symbols of menstruation, cannibalism and blood transfusion. Fabre's work produces polarised and sometimes passionate reactions. In predominantly Catholic France, for example, critics hailed him as a visionary. Conversely, he is often accused of trying to shock and provoke.

"I see it in a big tradition of classical art," says Fabre. "When I first saw those masterpieces in Bruges, all these paintings with Christ, the stigmata, the blood, I was incredibly taken by them, mentally and physically. It was like I discovered body art and performance before I even knew the terms." A year later Fabre gave his first performance, titled My body, my blood, my landscape, cutting his own body in symbolic places and using the blood to make drawings and write texts. He hasn't looked back.

Fabre performed one of his earliest works in Australia, at the 1984 Adelaide Festival, a 270-minute marathon titled The Bowels of Physical Madness, and managed to confound his audience there. "It was a much more extreme piece than I Am Blood and, ah, I think the people were quite shocked," he says.

"There was this fairytale in the performance, you know the prince and the princess, that entailed breaking down and revealing mythologies, and we 'killed' frogs on stage. Of course we didn't, it was a theatre trick, but people didn't get it, they went crazy. Which is silly because a frog doesn't have red blood, it's a cold-blooded animal."

Fabre looks put out about this: he is an entomologist, with a scientist's eye for detail and research - and, of course, blood. And he has a specific goal in mind with I Am Blood.

"It's basically about one man's quest for the future body of humankind," he explains, "which is the liquid body. So one of the final scenes is where they cut themselves open in various places 34 times."

The text is delivered as a long litany by two medieval surgeons, ritualistically announcing the incisions. "The basic idea is to cleave the shell of the old body and leave it behind, allowing the new, liquid body to come into being," says Fabre. "This body is blood.

"It's the only substance in the body that can survive on its own. When you really study blood it contains the oldest memory of this planet. The reason blood is red is because it still contains the coloured iron of the first seas. It's like a complete other planet we don't know anything about, but we know it has a lot of memory and wisdom."

Whatever one feels about this idea and the way he presents it, Fabre is genuine in his artistic intent. Some will be happy to let his explicit, often brutal images (and music) wash over them, but others will need to know where this unusual artist is coming from, and the nature of his fixations. "It's another way of thinking and of approaching theatre and dramaturgy," he says. "It's my vocabulary."

I Am Blood is at the State Theatre from October 17-20 as part of the Melbourne Festival.